Messaging Strategy, Content Brand Guidelines, Website Copywriting
What do they do?
Summit Energy Evolution Ltd (SEEL) are a newly-created, wholly-owned subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation, with a focus on new energy and decarbonisation projects. Their mission is to leverage Sumitomo Corporation’s interest across a broad spectrum of low carbon technologies, including hydrogen and CCS, as well as looking for synergies with the corporation’s capabilities in the areas of equity and finance, renewables, infrastructure, and the supply chain. SEEL were formed in June 2022 when its predecessor, Summit Exploration and Production Limited (SEPL) was sold, divesting all Sumitomo’s upstream oil and gas assets in the UK as they look towards a net zero future.
What did they need?
A full brand identity creation. The challenge for SEEL is considerable. They are essentially a new business in an immature, but hugely important, sector, where there is massive attention but a lack of cohesion and trust. The senior leaders within SEEL, although vastly experienced, have been used to working in a very mature sector where most communication challenges and norms were settled 25 years ago. Now they find themselves in the complete reverse situation. So establishing the correct brand positioning and credibility was absolutely vital. First and foremost SEEL needed someone they could trust to lead the entire process, manage a team of creatives, take responsibility for all the phases of work required, and bring them to a successful outcome within 5 months.
What did we do?
Phase 1: Forming the project team and establishing brand positioning – At the outset the only thing which was in place was the new company name, everything else needed to be created. So the first phase of work was to take SEEL through our content brand guidelines creation process which involved research into the sector and established the core rationale for the brand. Onto that was mapped a messaging strategy, formalised as part of a comprehensive new brand guidelines document. As a key requirement was the creation of a new website, we also needed a partner to help with both visual identity and website design. SEEL did not have much experience of procuring creative services so Sufu took the lead on this and helped SEEL select Boost Design as a partner to work on the visual identity and build a website using Webflow.
Phase 2: Visual Identity creation – Sufu worked closely with Boost Design to develop the look and feel of the visual identity, including a new logo, colour scheme. Together we were able to develop a really interesting visual representation of the brand mission, by use of a graduated colour scheme going from grey > blue > green, following the ‘hydrogen spectrum’ and its journey through the era of energy transition.
Phase 3: Website creation and brand launch – Sufu created the sitemap for the intial iteration of the SEEL website and wrote all the page copy ahead of the website design & build, meaning Boost had full content to incorporate into their designs. This made the process much faster and much easier for SEEL to review and approve. No lorem ipsum needed! The site went live 24 hours before the brand launch as part of SEEL co-sponsoring the SNS 2023 industry event where the website was unveiled from SEEL’s exhibition stand, designed in the new brand identity (another collaboration between Sufu and Design Pit.)